Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Temporal realities.

¤ Maybe it's just my general anti-canine bias, but I really find it embarrassing the way Bush is always in stupid photos with his ratty little black dog. And I think the man is an idiot, and would rather he did not represent my country on the world stage, so for me to be embarrassed to the point of feeling bad for him, it has to be cringe-worthy.

There was that ridiculous tale of Bush trying to read a book to some elementary school kids that his yappy little Yorkie interrupted by charging around and scaring the kids, and he's always getting the mutt's leash tangled up as he tries to lead it onto the Air Force One helicopter. I just picture Nightcrawler bamf'ing in and kicking ass and Bush trying to run with his mutt cradled in his arms and tripping over the leash.

U.S. President George W. Bush looks down at his dog Barney as Australian Prime Minister John Howard speaks during a joint press conference held on the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, May 3, 2003. Howard and his wife Janette spent the night at the ranch. The two leaders met to discuss post war Iraq, national security and trade issues. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Now today here's this story with him standing out in some god forsaken field with two ridiculous podiums set up, and he's all distracted by the mutt.  Jesus Christ, if you must bring your dog everywhere with you, can't you have it on a fucking leash and the Secret Service standing on it? Have a little dignity, for Christ's sake.  It's not like you're the most powerful figurehead man on earth or anything.

I'll give Clinton credit for just having a cat, a properly-dignified pet.  He eventually got a dog, for some reason, but at least he didn't drag it with him to every speech and photo op. Of course he dragged CS'ing interns to them, and made a far bigger fool of himself, but anyway.  Though really, my opinion of Bush would probably improve if he got caught with an intern.  Showing some passion for something besides greed and power and revenge.

Also, it's rather ridiculous to hold a press conference on a dirt road in front of hay bales, with formal presidential podiums and in dress clothing. Could we just have a semi-formal auditorium somewhere?  Or do this on a back deck with a ranch backdrop?

The whole "I'm a rancher" thing Bush does to appear a man of the people is sort of annoying also. He bought the damn place in 1999 as part of his image make over anyway.

Dubya, you were born a millionaire, you've lived as a millionaire, and you'll die as a millionaire, primarily since your business acumen wasn't good enough to move into the billionaire class even with the back scratching sweetheart oil company, Texas Rangers partnership, and insider trading. You went to Yale, getting in since daddy was a powerful politician. Wearing designer work clothing and chopping firewood for photo ops doth not a rancher make.

At work we get the head bosses coming in from time to time to act like they could do real work if they had to.  They'll carry around some stuff and make some cotton candy and count some inventory.  Everyone smiles and pretends they are doing great work and we're so glad to see them there, and after five minutes they think they've proved their point and leave.  And once they are gone, we throw away all the unsaleable product they produced, and recount all the inventory they screwed up, and refile all the merchandise they put in the wrong place and laugh about what idiots the bosses are.

I think you see the parallel here.

Honestly, I'm not really picking on Bush in this instance.  Every lord of a manor does this, and most heads of businesses do it as well, as they try to remember what it was like back when they had to work for a living, rather than just tell people what to do and when to work.  The vast majority of businesses in the world keep running entirely on the backs of the low level employees, as they find ways to keep getting their work done while circumventing the idiotic stuff their bosses burden them with.

¤ Interesting article on how male and female brain types differ, with tests to see how you stand. The tests aren't very good; both are very redundant with about a dozen questions on each covering the same thing from slightly different angles, which makes them tedious.  They should have cut about 20 questions from each test and just left in three or four representative ones, and weighted them heavily.

Anyway, I scored a 34 on the EQ test, and 24 on the SQ test.  Which means I'm less sensitive to emotions than most men and far less than women (EQ), and less interested in how things work than most men, and about equal to how most women are (SQ).

I think the EQ one is probably suspect, since most people *want* to think of themselves as empathic and sensitive and caring, and will say that yes, of course they help strangers feel welcome, and feel terrible at disasters on the news, etc.  When they really don't give a shit, and they were making jokes about Osama Bin Laden's favorite football team (The New York Jets) by October 2001.  My point being that they probably answer the test questions how they want to be, rather than how they really are.  Which puts the averages much higher than reality would suggest.

Because no one else is honest.  Just me.  Yes, that's it.

ne of the things I most enjoy about running two websites, (this one being by far the less busy) is the reader mail. I enjoy writing an article or rant or blog or story, and getting feedback on it, immediate feedback, if possible. And while it's fun to be praised, it's usually more useful to get more critical feedback, especially on my writing.  Feedback that points out strengths and weaknesses, and is constructive and useful to me as I endeavor to improve a given story in rewrites, and also to give me ideas on how to write the next one so it's better in the first place.

And it's just fun as an author to hear what people think of your work.  Some writers prefer to do it all for themselves and then ignore reviews and reader mail.  I'm not like that.

A small subtype of mail is the angry flame, and I often enjoy these most of all.  The loving, praise-filled mails tend to fill me with guilt and unease and some discontent; why is someone saying such nice things about me?  I'm worthless and hate myself.  Etc.  But the hate-mails are much more enjoyable.  Not because I wallow in self-loathing and they back up my feelings, but because they are almost always so utterly idiotic.  It's impossible to be offended by a mail from someone who is clearly far too stupid to even begin to understand the point of what they are hating.

I take an absolute glee in posting the nastiest of flames in the feedback sections to my D2 columns, and I like to regard them (the flames) like bugs.  Stick them to a cork board with a pin and then dissect them, scientifically. I had fun with one a couple of months ago in my twelfth D2 column (scroll down to the mail from "Treovr"), and I'm actually looking forward to doing the feedback next week for #16, since there are several just kerosene soaked flames from people who are so exactly like the "most annoying people" examples that the article exists to lampoon.

When I was initially writing the Band Names section for this site, I had high hopes of it being discovered by the young and clueless fans of various talentless teenie-bopper bands.  Take your pick.  Britney, N'Sync, etc.  I'm sure there are a bunch of newer ones I've never even heard of or bothered to insult properly yet.

Unfortunately, that has never yet happened, though it still might. I also wrote the Band Names FAQ almost before I'd ever received any mail about the section, since I knew perfectly well what people would write in to object to.  If this site had the same reading audience (a large part of which is young and very dumb) as the D2 site does, I would be fairly swimming in clueless and wrathful mails.  Unfortunately that hasn't yet happened, so I have to make due with the occasional bit of teen fury. Such as this one, which came in today:

Linkin Park gets a 1? You are a complete idiot sir. They are by far and wide the most popular band in the world a of this date, not to mention the most original. They invented rap/rock, and they are the only ones to make it sound excellent. Their extreme skill in mixing multiple symphonic sounds with tempos and rythem changes is unparalleled. Not to mention all of their lyrics are clear cut intelligent morality. You sicken me, Mr. Nync = 9 faggot.

Jeremy Omega

This is almost too perfect to believe, in my opinion.  I laughed so hard when I first read this that I had to pace around, and finally go lie down.  My favorite parts are when he praises Linkin Park's child-safe lyrics and morality one sentence before calling me a "faggot", and when he talks about how they "invented rap/rock".

Two of the key elements of a good flame (good in terms of making the idiot flamer more clearly an idiot) are to make enormously laughable errors out of your ignorance while calling someone else wrong, and to be utterly hypocritical and insulting.  He's got both of those down pat.  This mail is tragically lacking in horrible AOLese style grammar, and it needs a lot more profanity, but it hits pretty well on the other cylinders.

I doubt many readers need me to point it out, but Linkin Park was about the 500th band to jump into the act of beating the dead horse that is rap/rock.  The first I ever heard of it was in the old Anthrax EP I'm the Man, which I used to own, long ago. There may well be other bands who were earlier, also. You'll note that Anthrax released that EP in 1990, while Linkin Park's first album came along in October of 2000. As far as I know the guys in the band are all in their early 20's, so being as they were in grade school when Anthrax was pioneering rap/metal...

The other key element to a good flame is to make a fool of yourself by completely misinterpreting whatever you are mailing about. It helps a lot to be young or dumb or clueless, or at least very lacking in reading comprehension, and too dumb to realize it.  Since the entire point of the Band Names section is that it rates the band's name, it's pretty idiotic to take the score as a referendum on the quality of the band.  Aside from in the few cases where I awarded massive negative bonus points just because I hate them.  And most of those are specifically mentioned in the FAQ:

The lowest scores are all due to substantial bonus point penalties. Extreme stands at -5, Journey at -2, and Rush at -5.

I did take away two bonus points in Linkin Park's entry, (Which I just read and cracked up at.  I never remember anything I write three months later.)  one for the fansite on which I found info about them being just wretched, and the other for them being all goody two-shoes and not saying bad words.  And true, I make several nasty remarks about them in the entry, but if their name didn't suck, they would have gotten a good score for it. I'd still think they suck, but the name scores are entirely impartial.  It's the comments and bonus points that are subjective and frequently unfair.  Which is, of course, the whole fun.

Also, if you read the N'Sync entry, (and any other Boy Band entry) how can you possibly come to the conclusion that I don't despise them? They got a high score since their name perfectly sums up what they are.  Is that such a difficult concept?

Well yes, actually.

¤ On a slightly different front, here's another recent mail, of the high praise type. And it sent me into a typical fit of self-reflection and confusion.

I found this strange: somewhere in the February mailbag you talked about being useless or lazy or unproductive or just whatever. Honestly, my first time checking out this site left me wondering, "how many kinds of speed is flux on?" With the D2.net thing, the 8-page-blog thing, the "surfing for hours to run into newsworthy items and increase world knowledge in general" thing, the D2 gaming thing, the occasional fiction-writing thing, the column-writing thing, the wading-through-email thing, the resulting "respond to a sea of daily emails that merit response" thing, the host of daily things we all have to do and, presumably, contemplating your navel regularly... it seemed like a lot to me. I was impressed. Ya weirdo.

Another one from Stephen on the same subject.  His mail is continued below, for reasons you'll grasp once you read the rest of it. 

I've been a regular visitor to your site since I stumbled over a link at diabloii.net and since it's a friday evening and not much on my mind I thought I just give you some credit for all that work you put into your site. The amount you writing is pretty amazing and I am suprised that you get anything done at all since it must be so time consuming, though your sleeping pattern wouldn't suit me. 

Since I regularly feel like I'm (continuing to) utterly waste my life and my time, or at least most of it, this mail threw me off. It's not just that I don't feel like I'm doing enough of what I *should* be doing, it's that I don't feel like what I do is even all that much, or that great.

I quoted the above to Malaya, and she had what I thought was a very insightful point.  To paraphrase, she said that I did a lot, but that none of it was a challenge to me.  At first I didn't agree, but after a moment of thought I realized she was absolutely correct.

It sounds really immodest, but what I do with my writing now is very easy for me.  I write these blogs essentially as fast as I can type them out (which is pretty fast), and my D2 site stuff isn't much different.  I might have to do a bit of research on a D2 article or a blog topic, but that's just to get a bit of information.  Once I read something and digest it, I can go on pretty much indefinitely about it.

In college and high school I always felt guilty about writing reports, since I'd basically speed read a book and some articles on the topic, take some notes while I was doing it, and then a week later I'd write my report in an hour or two.  It would usually need a few tweaks and minor changes, but the rough draft was pretty much what my final paper looked like. Then when the day came to turn in the 6 or 8 or 10 or however many page essay, I'd stay quiet while most of the other students compared horror stories about spending an entire week or weekend doing nothing but the paper, how they wrote and rewrote the entire thing half a dozen times, how they still hated it, etc.  And then we'd get them back and I'd have an A- or something, and people who I knew for a fact spent at least ten times more effort and time on it than I did got a C+, and clearly that was just a mercy grade since the teacher knew they had put in a lot of effort.

That's pretty much how the blog and D2 site are now.  I write the stuff up off the top of my head with no preparation or notes, it gets about 1% changed in proof reading, and I post it.  It's very easy for me to do this, and I'm brilliant or blessed or lucky or a prodigy or ungrateful, or whatever you want to view it as (I'm not sure what I view it as) in that my very quick work churns out material that most people think is of excellent quality.

This results in an odd dichotomy, where I don't really think I'm doing anything special or that good, but most readers think it's great.  And perhaps it is "great", objectively speaking, but I'm in no position to judge fairly.

The point is, as Malaya pointed out, that it's not a challenge to me, and therefore I don't really take much pride in it, even when I get all sorts of praise on it.  To again be immodest, compare to oh... Kobe Bryant hitting jump shots in practice.  To the rest of us, he'd be putting on an amazing clinic of shooting ability as he made dozens of shots in a row from all spots on the court.  But for him, with his natural ability and years of practice, it's nothing.  If you praised him for making all his free throws in warm ups, he'd wonder what the hell you were talking about.  Of course he makes his shots in practice.  That's what he does.

The difference between Kobe and I is that he goes on to compete at the highest level and succeeds wildly at it, while I keep shooting in practice, or playing on the local playground with kids, never really pushing my talents to the proverbial "higher level". And it's really not about being published and seeing my novels best sellers (well, maybe a little).  It's about challenging myself, and working on something that I really have to work on. Creating an entire fantasy world and dozens of great characters and lots of great plot elements and working on that for hours every day and amazing myself with how good it turns out.  Rather than spending a few hours banging out a quick and humorous D2 holiday story every few months, or a short story read by a few hundred people on my website two or three times a year.

And if you remember the quoted mail above from Stephen, here's the rest of it:

I was actually thinking about your writing career which seems at a stall since that mysterious editor has not been notified about your talent. I am not taking any offence here, talent your have - that's for sure. I used to write quite a lot myself and still do and writing is what keeps me sane.

I am pretty sure that your confident that your writing is probably much better what get published these days, be it a Diablo or Warcraft novel or whatever (it is, beliveve me ;) ). However you seem very reluctant (yet) to actually go for it. I sometimes get the notion that you're waiting for that editor turning up at your door step.

On the other hand that editor just might tell you your writings just sucks which definitely would send a tremor though ones beliefs.

So yeah, and this is what I've been telling myself for oh... 7 or 8 years now.  What am I waiting for?  Why do I put off writing something really big, something really great, something that would really challenge me as a writer and push me to do better work than I ever have before?

It's so much easier to just keep doing what I can do well now, but since it doesn't pay, and it's not making me happy... why is this all I do? Malaya regularly smacks me about this, and that's fine, since I certainly deserved to be smacked for it.

All I can say is that I'm more aware of this now than ever before, and my awareness is of a "It's time to do it." rather than, "I'll never do it and I want to die."  Which is where it's been in the past.  I've also spent a lot of time with, "My writing is pretty good, but it's not perfect." Which was true, and may still be, but I have to realize that it will never be "perfect" to my internal critic.  And that about 1% of the published novels I've read in my life were "perfect", in my judgment.  And despite that, most of them sold quite a few copies and earned their authors a very comfortable living.

I need to learn to substitute "good enough" for "perfect", and be pragmatic and a realist, and stop using lack of perfection as an excuse to put off what needs to be done, and what I so desperately want to do.

And I do thank you all for your support and emails of encouragement.  Feel free to write me with any opinions or thoughts on my work or life or psychology, any time you like.  If I write about it on this site, I'm clearly opening it up for discussion.

And no, this isn't just an excuse to have more email to read and thus further push back the "get to writing a novel".  I don't think...

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